The $400B semiconductor industry is dealing with unprecedented difficulties relating to the continued increased complexities of today's new silicon. With devices including over 50M logic gates being common, and over 10% containing about 1 B transistors, the human engineer's ability to understand all aspects of the SoC (System on Chip) being designed are greatly diminished, if not over. System complexities are creating an environment of unreasonable development schedules, costs, and risks. For example, a typical 20 nm new product may take years to bring to market, cost over $150M to develop, and be outdated before reaching the required sale of over 10M units at $20 each to break even. Forecasts expect that by 2020, some parts will become 10 times more complex when reaching the 5 nm process node, with development costs exceeding $1 B. As the limits of Moore's Law are reached, the problems associated with realizing increased system complexities continue to grow as functionality extends beyond the boundaries of a monolithic devices with collaborative distributed system ecosystems.
These problems are creating difficulties in developing the new innovative products required by OEM system developers, who instead are having to settle for older existing catalog parts. System designers may no longer rely on silicon providers alone to address their SoC design needs, and require new capabilities and tools to drive the successful development of complex future ICs. The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry has delivered tremendous capabilities that have proven critical in bringing the semiconductor market to where it is today. Although EDA advancements have embraced and met the challenge to improve design productivity so that today's advanced processes may be utilized, together these advancements have now created a further need for SDA capabilities.
Considering the present developments and growth in the SDA industry a number of pressing needs have emerged. There are community needs by which SDA tools may provide essential interfaces to manage the integration of all IC development flow tasks. These interfaces would allow full leveraging of SDA capabilities by flow development methods, as well as the added benefit of ensuring all stakeholders of an IC development flow may work together compatibly and more effectively.
Simplicity needs exist. System designers should be free from IC hardware and/or software design burdens, as they seek to define and automate complex new SoC devices. Unlike EDA tools developed and used by IC design engineers, SDA tools need to focus primarily, but not exclusively, on system developer needs.
SDA tools also have reuse needs, including the efficient and effective reuse of functional IP. IP reuse typically fails to solve the problem of IP integration and verification. SDA tools need to provide for extending IP reuse to the way that IP is used through all IC design flow aspects. In addition, for easy reuse, cleanly partitioned IP functions should define all required functionality though automation.
Architecture needs also exist. System automation requires standardizing the way IP integrates together in a flexible and configurable manner. Architecture not only involves the circuitry required to physically connect IP functions together, but also methods for defining, managing, and optimizing the required configurability of an inherently flexible system.
Because SoCs may be very large and complex, needs exist for functional methods of bringing together communities of engineers and developers. Further, today's SDA engineering and design community seeks to deliver complete functional SoC designs including both digital and analog hardware, as well as embedded and driver software. In so doing, they concentrate on solving all aspects of the way that various functions are integrated, verified, and validated in a collaborative practical functional SDA solution. Through these efforts, the resulting SDA systems also provide a platform that manages various business aspects of building systems. These building systems include managing IP licensing from multiple vendors, including managing aspects of data, files, use support, bugs, licensing agreements, and auditing. These tasks frequently discourage the adoption of IP from outside sources.
Now, more than at any previous time, the need exists for increased collaboration to deal with increased complexities. Collaboration provides the only ways that customers, definers, decision makers, designers, manufacturers, and suppliers may work closer to ensure project success. Installing new software tools may require laborious evaluation and approvals, making it difficult to adopt new disruptive capabilities. Acceleration capabilities may create unreasonable demand spikes on available infrastructure. Yet, security risks for increased collaboration necessitate a safe neutral ecosystem that remains accessible to all stakeholders. Properly addressing these growing concerns becomes ever more necessary.
The IP market has been demonstrating 15-22% growth, with a forecast for continuing growth of about 18% over the next several years. But this is without the use of SDA capabilities. SDA further addresses, and even removes, some of the known barriers to IP reuse, further extending the benefit of IP reuse to all aspects of the IC design flow. As such, SDA may significantly increase the IP market Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) to create and meet a significant untapped identified and growing market need.
Further, the pervasive use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) hardware and software launches mankind into the dawn of a new era. System developers at the forefront of AI advancements are developing and deploying new capabilities for interacting with an ever-evolving and random world. System design needs for automating autonomous tasks in collaboratively working with distributed systems emerge from future growing engineering and design complexities. Many needs exist for SDA-based designs that provide a powerful and simple path to either interface or integrate Machine Learning (ML) and AI capabilities into scalable and flexible designs.
There are needs for SDA designs to offer developers maximum operational flexibility. Mixed signal hardware and software IP must operate together as a multi-agent system, requiring no master controller to collaborate. Further, SDA-based designs must route data as necessary through the entire system, while providing all the ‘hooks’ necessary to provide system observability, and adaptability. There are needs for SDA system features that make designs ‘AI-friendly,’ so that integration of ML and AI IP may be simply plugged into the system. Existing working system operation need to be monitored for ML, and behavior adapted, during operation using AI mixed signal IP tools. Additionally, input data from other outside sources may also be observed for improved intelligent operation. Today, no known standard system or approach satisfies these increasingly acute needs.
The time of intelligent adaptable distributed system operation is upon us. Old methods of operation and interoperability fall short. Today, the industry demands a simple and efficient approach to automate system design for the future.